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4.14 AVERAGE
4.14 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
When it's good it reads like powerful poetry, when it isn't it's like listening to the ramblings of an old pothead. The acronyms and the diatribes around certain events will make little sense unless you have read some other military/Vietnam books before. There isn't a single footnote in the entire book and Herr will sometimes go off the deep end on some events that I feel only people that were there would recognize.
Overall, it's not like any other war memoir I've read, it won't teach you anything about the real history or battles of Vietnam War, but it captures the feeling really well. It oozes with that mystical/psychodelic stench of the '60s and establishes the iconography and imagery that we see in Vietnam movies henceforth, not to mention the lens through which we view the War.
As much as I don't like the way the book is put together and wish some things were elaborated on while others truncated, Dispatches is probably one of the most significant Vietnam War works ever produced. Though it is definitely not as easily digestible and absorbed as other works about the War.
Overall, it's not like any other war memoir I've read, it won't teach you anything about the real history or battles of Vietnam War, but it captures the feeling really well. It oozes with that mystical/psychodelic stench of the '60s and establishes the iconography and imagery that we see in Vietnam movies henceforth, not to mention the lens through which we view the War.
As much as I don't like the way the book is put together and wish some things were elaborated on while others truncated, Dispatches is probably one of the most significant Vietnam War works ever produced. Though it is definitely not as easily digestible and absorbed as other works about the War.
The words "gut-wrenching" have been used one too many times for them to convey the intended gravitas. But for once, those words are perhaps the most apt.
War, as all but the most bellicose and jingoistic of people would tell us, always leaves behind broken men, broken societies, broken countries. Why do wars still happen, then, an idealist might ask. The answer, as this book reveals, is that war is often "glamorous".
Not in the way a shiny new car is glamorous, but in a much deeper way that tugs at certain primal strings in all of us.
"...Lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men."
Justum bellum, we say, but even a just war kills, and the dead are no less dead for knowing they were victims (unintended or intended) of a war that had the imprimatur of the gods.
This book will remain relevant as long as men (and it's overwhelmingly men, even now) continue to go to war with one another, and as long as wars continue to be labeled with a glossy, glamorous paint - "just or unjust."
War, as all but the most bellicose and jingoistic of people would tell us, always leaves behind broken men, broken societies, broken countries. Why do wars still happen, then, an idealist might ask. The answer, as this book reveals, is that war is often "glamorous".
Not in the way a shiny new car is glamorous, but in a much deeper way that tugs at certain primal strings in all of us.
"...Lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men."
Justum bellum, we say, but even a just war kills, and the dead are no less dead for knowing they were victims (unintended or intended) of a war that had the imprimatur of the gods.
This book will remain relevant as long as men (and it's overwhelmingly men, even now) continue to go to war with one another, and as long as wars continue to be labeled with a glossy, glamorous paint - "just or unjust."
Good Lord weren't the 6os and 70s a time for gonzo journalism. This is as close as you're going to get to it, even more than Hunter S. Thompson since it's not befogged by drugs and attitude.
Herr places himself in the action, uses the jargon and the hallucinatory prose to depict in paper form the incarnation of a hallucinatory, weird war. You get the fairy tales from the higher ups, the haunting stories, the exoticism and racial tensions and sheer carnage.
It feels traumatic just reading it.
Herr places himself in the action, uses the jargon and the hallucinatory prose to depict in paper form the incarnation of a hallucinatory, weird war. You get the fairy tales from the higher ups, the haunting stories, the exoticism and racial tensions and sheer carnage.
It feels traumatic just reading it.
Intense, hallucinogenic, truer than true, this is the story of a hard year in Vietnam by a very talented writer. Michael Herr spent 1968 with the grunts, in Tet, at Khe Sanh, on China Beach. He spent it drinking in the bar of the the Continental Hotel, smoking dope in Saigon slums, sipping whiskey in bunkers by the light of parachute flares. You can't read this book and not feel the madness, the glamour, the transfixing power of War, and the way it touched and and transformed the men who fought it.
Called by some as the greatest personal war journal ever, this book did not disappoint. One of the most important non-fiction books of American history.
This book knocked the wind out of me when I read it, because it was the first time I felt that I had a way to understand the experiences of my friends who are Vietnam War veterans. Herr's writing style brought back the immediacy of the war-time situation, and how the slightest twist of fate decided who lived and who died. Other, later, books outline different facets of the Vietnam experience, but this one remains a favorite because it made the battlefront a part of my experience as well.
dark
funny
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Content Warnings
Moderate: Cursing, Drug use, Gore, Gun violence, Violence
Minor: Racial slurs